{"id":47343,"date":"2026-03-11T10:51:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T10:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/xais-macrohard-project-stalls-as-tesla-ramps-up-a-similar-ai-agent-effort\/"},"modified":"2026-03-11T10:51:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T10:51:15","slug":"xais-macrohard-project-stalls-as-tesla-ramps-up-a-similar-ai-agent-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/xais-macrohard-project-stalls-as-tesla-ramps-up-a-similar-ai-agent-effort\/","title":{"rendered":"XAI&#8217;s Macrohard project stalls as Tesla ramps up a similar AI agent effort"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69b0827b441e48aec3a1d8d4?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Tesla and xAI logos\"\/><figcaption>\n<p>Illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis\/NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>XAI&#039;s Macrohard project has stalled amid leadership changes and a data project pause.<\/li>\n<li>Tesla is working on a &#039;Digital Optimus&#039; project that involves developing an AI agent.<\/li>\n<li>Elon Musk first announced Macrohard in August.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Macrohard, XAI&#039;s ambitious AI agent project, has stalled following leadership shake-ups and suspension of a data project involving 600 contractors, people familiar with the situation told Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, Musk&#039;s other company, Tesla, has been ramping up its own AI agent project called &quot;Digital Optimus,&quot; according to workers.<\/p>\n<p>CEO Elon Musk announced Macrohard \u2014 a tongue-in-cheek reference to &quot;Microsoft&quot; \u2014 in August. Since &quot;software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI,&quot; he said on X at the time. The effort has aimed to build an AI white-collar worker.<\/p>\n<p>Macrohard has been considered one of xAI&#039;s core projects, alongside Grok Code and Grok Imagine.<\/p>\n<p>Since its launch, Macrohard has shuffled between a number of leaders and faced difficulty scaling up, according to company insiders.<\/p>\n<p>Two Macrohard leaders left the company in February, people with knowledge of the departures said.<\/p>\n<p>During an all-hands meeting shortly thereafter, Musk announced that xAI cofounder Toby Pohlen would oversee the project. Pohlen announced his exit 16 days later.<\/p>\n<p>He had faced pressure from Musk regarding the project&#039;s development, although Musk also expressed displeasure with the team&#039;s progress in the months before he took over.<\/p>\n<p>Pohlen declined to comment.<\/p>\n<p>Musk and representatives for xAI and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<p>Nearly two dozen xAI engineers identified themselves as working on Macrohard via X or LinkedIn. Most have left the company or shifted to a different team in recent months, including more than a dozen departures in the past month alone.<\/p>\n<p>It&#039;s unclear how many people remain assigned to the project.<\/p>\n<h2>Enter Tesla<\/h2>\n<p>In recent weeks, some employees were told some Macrohard work would shift to Tesla&#039;s Autopilot team, along with some of Macrohard&#039;s computing capacity, insiders said.<\/p>\n<p>Tesla has also been working on an AI agent known internally as &quot;Digital Optimus,&quot; a nod to the humanoid robot Tesla has been building since 2021. The digital version is meant to act as an AI agent that can perform tasks on a computer.<\/p>\n<p>In February, Tesla posted a role for an AI engineer to work on a computer use agent \u2014 a similar type of agent that xAI&#039;s Macrohard has focused on \u2014 that can perform tasks like &quot;autonomous software interaction, code generation, and real-time decision-making.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Instead of relying primarily on models that analyze screenshots, which is a common approach for computer-use agents, the team is focusing on real-time control methods. In other words, the AI processes a continuous stream of information and responds, rather than analyzing a frozen image and acting step by step.<\/p>\n<p>The approach is similar to how its Full Self-Driving system processes live video. Musk has repeatedly told xAI employees that the project should emulate Tesla&#039;s work with Full Self-Driving, which uses video data to help the AI learn to navigate its environment in real time. <\/p>\n<p>Tesla has also used similar techniques in developing its humanoid robot.<\/p>\n<p>It marks a different strategy from xAI&#039;s Macrohard project, which was trained primarily on static images rather than continuous video.<\/p>\n<p>XAI does not currently have any job openings listed for the Macrohard team, according to a review of the company&#039;s careers page.<\/p>\n<h2>A pause on data collection<\/h2>\n<p>A data annotation project for Macrohard that involved more than 600 AI tutors was paused last month, according to a memo viewed by Business Insider. xAI employs around a thousand contract workers who help hone Grok and teach it to do everything from maintain a conversational tone to generate realistic images.<\/p>\n<p>The workers on the Macrohard project were told to screen record their work and leisure activities in order to train the AI how to emulate their actions and act as a digital agent.<\/p>\n<p>A project lead told workers in early February that researchers had &quot;discovered many flaws within the model, and would like to make some changes to our model and the way we collect data,&quot; the memo said. Workers were told at the time that data collection would resume in two to four weeks.<\/p>\n<p>As of this week, the project is still on pause.<\/p>\n<p>Separately, xAI had tutors working to hone the agent&#039;s ability to act as an AI sales assistant for SpaceX&#039;s website and a separate project that trained the system on how to use spreadsheets, people with knowledge of the teams said.<\/p>\n<p>Tesla and xAI have collaborated in the past, including on integrating Grok into vehicles. <\/p>\n<p>In January, Tesla announced it had agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI to begin &quot;evaluating potential AI collaborations between the companies.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>In a January podcast appearance, Sulaiman Ghori, an xAI engineer who worked on Macrohard and has since left the company, compared xAI&#039;s work to a digital version of Optimus. <\/p>\n<p>Just as the humanoid robot performs physical human actions, he said, the AI agent would be able to perform human actions in a digital environment.<\/p>\n<p>Ghori also mentioned using unused Teslas to power the system in the future as they continued to scale Macrohard.<\/p>\n<p><em>Do you work for xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at <\/em><em>gkay@businessinsider.com<\/em><em> or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; <\/em>here&#039;s our guide to sharing information securely<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis\/NurPhoto via Getty Images XAI&#039;s Macrohard project has stalled amid leadership changes and a data project pause. Tesla is working on a &#039;Digital Optimus&#039; project that involves developing an AI agent. Elon Musk first announced Macrohard in August. Macrohard, XAI&#039;s ambitious AI agent project, has stalled following leadership shake-ups and suspension of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}